An Excerpt from ‘The Bookmen’
During 1965, P. F. Collier Inc. (Crowell-Collier Macmillan) had formed two encyclopedia sales divisions in the growing metropolis of Los Angeles. The burgeoning population easily supported a large sales force going door-to-door. Their manpower needs were supplemented each summer with college students, a well-thought-out strategy, as our wholesome appearance opened doors otherwise resistant to salesmen, and our sales pitch didn’t require sophisticated closes. The company had reworked it to minimize the need for experienced salesmen, replacing the hard-sell approach with a “negative sales” approach. They framed it as a demonstration project placing encyclopedias in “select” homes for the publicity value.
In theory, the sets of encyclopedias cost nothing. All one had to do was keep them up to date - by purchasing ten years of the yearbooks for $365, payable over three years. The purchaser qualified for credit by having a telephone and a checking or savings account. The qualifier. the first part of the pitch sought credit information without saying so or disclosing that it was a sales call. If the prospects didn’t qualify, called a DQ, they never knew for sure that they’d had a sales call.
We were doing “market research,” and the key information we needed was to identify the preferred shopping and banking choices of the prospective buyer. Not relying solely on the questionable judgment of neophyte sales crews, the credit manager verified every transaction over the phone. To minimize the perceived cost, we told buyers that payments were no more than the cost of a pack of cigarettes a day - at a time when smoking was highly popular.
When I signed on with Collier’s the previous summer, the office manager in Pasadena, Roger Brown, explained that the encyclopedias sustained the company’s publishing empire, as Life and Look had crushed Collier’s magazine and put it out of business nearly ten years ago. Our sales force was intentionally a blend of novices and veterans. We dominated the direct sales personnel of our chief competitors, Brittanica and Americana, who relied on leads to get inside and pitch a prospective family. Specializing in cold calls, we built our business out of nothing but words and shoe leather.
